Adelaide Park Lands
parks in Adelaide
The Adelaide Park Lands are a green belt forming a figure-eight configuration of open space on both banks of the River Torrens between Hackney and Thebarton, which encloses and separates the City of Adelaide area (including both the Adelaide city centre and North Adelaide) from the surrounding suburbia of greater metropolitan Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia. They were laid out by Colonel William Light in his design for the city, and originally consisted of 2,300 acres (930 ha) "exclusive of 32 acres (13 ha) for a public cemetery". One copy of Light's plan shows areas for a cemetery and a Post and Telegraph Store on West Terrace, a small Government Domain and Barracks on the central part of North Terrace, a hospital on East Terrace, a Botanical Garden on the River Torrens west of North Adelaide, and a school and a storehouse south-west of North Adelaide.
Over the years there has been constant encroachment on the Park Lands by the state government and others. Soon after their declaration in 1837, 370 acres (150 ha) "were lost to 'Government Reserves'". In 1902, The Herald noted that a total area of 489 acres (198 ha) had been taken from park lands. In 2018, the loss is about 568 acres (230 ha). The part of the Park Lands not in the "Government Reserves" have been managed and maintained by the Adelaide City Council since 1852, and since February 2007, the Adelaide Park Lands Authority has advised council and government.
On 7 November 2008 the Federal Minister for Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Peter Garrett, announced that the Adelaide Park Lands had been entered in the Australian National Heritage List as "an enduring treasure for the people of South Australia and the nation as a whole". In fact, large areas of the Adelaide Park Lands along the north side of the complete length of North Tce, and along the north side of Port Road from West Terrace to the Thebarton Police Barracks, (in Parks 11, 12, 26 and 27), and also the rail reserves, (in Parks 25, 26 and 27), were excluded from the "Adelaide Park Lands and City Layout National Heritage Place" listing.
“Adelaide Park Lands” enters the record as parks in Adelaide. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Adelaide, Park and Lands can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4681756. Authority coordinates are -34.935, 138.617. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1837, 1902, 2018 and 1852.
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This entry incorporates text from “Adelaide Park Lands” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.